


Safe to Shore

by intrikate88



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Lucid Dreaming, Magical Realism, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: (post-season 3, so there are spoilers)"All girls are filled with magic," Aneela had said, but if that's true, Dutch doesn't know what she is. She especially doesn't know how she made a wish and Johnny appeared, or what magic it will take to save him.





	Safe to Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monanotlisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monanotlisa/gifts).



The last thought Johnny had before having to deal with a pregnant Delle Seyah Kendry and his somehow-sperm-donor brother being flung out into space in a luxury freight elevator was that, as Dutch descended into the puddle of green plasma and whispered _I’m sorry_  to him, he deserved it. Yes, he and Dutch had started to patch up what had broken when he had returned from his quest to escape reprisal for murdering one of the Nine and to mourn Pawter in peace, but that didn’t change the fact that he had left. 

_Look, whatever trouble you’re in? We don’t have to stay here. We just fly away, and we never look back._

There had been a vow in that simple offer; something that from the moment he’d said it had bound them. He’d broken that promise, and maybe he deserved to watch her leave him. Maybe he should have taken her when he had fled the Quad, because they didn’t have to stay, and they didn’t have to look back.

Dutch looked back, and then she was gone. 

+

The light is wrong, and it makes Johnny’s eyes sting. There is something antiseptic about it, he thinks, even though the sting isn’t the same as chemical fumes. It feels like it might be able to bleach out every organic thing. 

He is on a beach. Water laps up onto the shore, but he can’t tell from the ground if the tide is high or low. Up ahead of him he can see two figures, standing unnaturally still and holding hands, the water flowing over their feet. It is some version of Aneela and Dutch, but they are bleached too. 

“Dutch!” he calls, then again: “ _Dutch_!” The words don’t carry well, even though he shouted as loud as he could. Sound should be able to carry far, in a place like this. Dutch doesn’t appear to have heard him. He watches as Aneela drops Dutch’s hand to stand in front of her, places her hands on Dutch’s shoulders, and presses a kiss to Dutch’s forehead. Then Aneela turns, and walks into the ocean, not changing her pace as the water reaches her knees, her hips, her chest, and then she submerges completely. Only once Aneela is gone does Dutch reach up to wipe her eyes and brush away tears that Johnny can’t see.

It doesn’t make sense; then he wakes up in the ship, and it makes sense. He’d fallen asleep on the table, the flask filled with the green placed next to his hand and providing no answers. It’s all he has of Aneela’s pool of green, what he’d been able to go back and get after the attack on the Necropolis and their trip through a decaying solar orbit. 

When he stands up to head to his real bed to sleep, sand falls off his boots. 

+

It happens three more times before he realizes that taking stabbed-lung-recovery naps hunched over a table and the flask of green are related. Each time, he finds himself walking through that bleached world, the moons heavy and close in the sky. There are houses he passes by, and they’re all empty. If he stops anywhere for too long, the whispers start. 

He’s always somewhere too far away from Dutch, but he sees her every time. Each time, she looks more frustrated. 

When he finally takes Aneela’s green back to his room with him to sleep through the night, Dutch catches him. “I did it,” she breathes, then hugs him, hard. 

“Ow, ow, still— still got a hole in my chest,” he grunts. “Which is weird, actually, you’d think I’d catch a break when it’s just a dream.”

“Is it just a dream?” asks Dutch, loosening her grip, and then stepping back. “What’s going on out there, Johnny?”

“Wait, what’s going on in _here_?” he asks her. “Because I’m rapidly getting the impression there’s some more of this green goopy bullshit going on, and I don’t remember going Hullen.” He looks around, and yes, everything is discolored, but there’s a rationality to it. “Shit, am I Hullen?”

“You’re not Hullen, Johnny, not unless you got yourself into something out there in the world,” Dutch replies, and sighs. 

“Oh thank fuck,” he says. “Look, I remember what happened when D’av hooked up with that girl and she spontaneously combusted green goo everywhere? I don’t want a magic dick that explodes people, Dutch, not even if they’re Hullen.” 

“Starting to wonder why I tried to get you here,” Dutch says. “Probably should have focused on Zeph, I don’t know.”

“I won’t talk about my non-magical dick,” Johnny promises. “But what in the _hells_ is going on.”

Dutch can’t claim any more knowledge than he can. She wished for him, and here he was, in this space holding the memories of the universe and retelling them in every second. 

When Johnny wakes up after that first night, he doesn’t know anything more about where Dutch is, or how to find her, but his hands and feet are cold, and Lucy tells him his body temperature dropped significantly as he slept. It’s only mild hypothermia, but it shouldn’t be happening on a ship where every millisecond the climate control is monitored for temperature and pressure and everything else that keeps people from dying in the vacuum of space. It isn’t good for people recovering from collapsed lungs.

The next time he goes in, he tells Dutch what happened. “You’re part of Aneela’s… bloodline, I suppose, now,” she says. “I think when she stabbed you, that weapon, our weapon, it drew you here. I think it belongs here. I need to know how to come out of the green, without bringing anything with me, and I’m… afraid.”

“We’ll work it out,” he promises. “You’ll be fine. You will.”

“I know,” she says. “You might not be. You’re the one who’s sleeping.”

+

Aneela had explained to her, as they had waited for the Lady to come for them, her own version of how she had pulled Dutch into life, into the world, but it isn’t an explanation in a language Dutch understands. Her life hasn’t had room for much more than the brutal, literal truth. All that time alone had locked Aneela into her own mind, grabbing at stories that made some sense of why she was so desperately, achingly alone. And in her tiny prison, where she found she could hoard the green she drained from herself, she was not neglected but beloved and powerful. She was a secret because all girls are filled with magic, _even girls not living in towers, even when the nights are not long and the days are not deep_. One girl saved her magic and hid it; the other girl was her magic. Magic, green and deep, the lifeblood out of veins and spines, connected across galaxies.  

Dutch understands that she had reached out in some way, wishing Johnny was by her side, but the reason it worked is a product of this green world that Aneela had found her freedom in, and in which Dutch was now trapped. This world, or maybe this magic, takes something for everything it gives, and then takes more. One girl makes a wish, and all those lives connect, but magic is never free. 

+

D’av takes over piloting the ship, keeping them out of harm’s way. Really, Lucy can pilot the ship on her own, and has picked up enough of Johnny’s piloting style that it isn’t always necessary to have someone at the helm, but D’avin needs somewhere to be useful. There isn’t much to do, these days, but it isn’t safe to stay anywhere, either, and space is very large.

Johnny naps. He would need to anyway, for recovery, probably. “You’re sleeping too much, John,” Lucy tells him disapprovingly.

“I have to find Dutch,” he tells her. 

+

In the green, Johnny and Dutch sit on the beach together. She sat here with Khlyen, she tells him, but it wasn’t her, but it was. There was a time when she and Aneela were the same person. She wasn’t a copy; copies have generation loss, small bits of information that go away with every copy made. The only reason Aneela lost information was because it was taken from her, and for Dutch, because it was withheld from her. 

“He should have known better,” John says mildly, but Dutch knows him too well to believe his tone. The recriminations and making up they’ve done for protecting each other through secrets, through Dutch keeping him from Level 5 and through Johnny killing Delle Seyah and leaving, have brought them too far to feel easy about that sort of thing.  

Dutch reaches for his hand and stares out to sea. “He should have known better," she agrees. Khlyen _had_ known better, and yet he had left them both blind to the truth, in his fantasy that he could control everything. “He thought he’d made weapons, for us, or of us. He thought that would let us defeat the Lady.”

Johnny frowns irritably as she mentions that rationale. He’s not exactly disposed to feeling generous towards Khlyen, after everything. “I’ve seen you fight for years, you don’t win because you’re some tool some guy made, you win because you throw your whole self into it.” He looks down at their hands, and brushes his thumb over hers, and mutters, “Maybe he gets to claim credit for some of Yalena Yardeen. But I watched you make Dutch on your own.” 

She remembers just as clearly as he does the night that saying “it’s not my blood” seemed the right answer to explain her soaked wedding dress, rather than pretending to this stranger that she was hurt until he let his guard down. She’d abandoned all that Khlyen had taught her and trusted a thief instead, and didn’t even know why. If it was all to lead in a circle back to the green and being trapped in the place she was created, then she still doesn’t know why.

“It took everything Khlyen gave us, or made us, and everything else besides, to stop the Lady,” says Dutch. “It took Aneela, after the Lady cursed me to destroy what was most important to me. Aneela was the one to give me life, and she walked into the sea for the green to take her, just to keep the Lady from ever coming out of here.” She pauses, because what did the Lady even know about what was important to her, or what she’d do even if something or someone was? She would send them into battle, to their deaths, regardless. “And I told Aneela to do it.” 

She still doesn’t know how to feel about losing Aneela. Time means so little in this place, and for all the time she had hated her, there was a time when both of them were a little girl the world had not yet touched. Dutch had wondered if maybe she could have loved that girl, or if she already had begun to.

He is quiet in contemplation, as the water laps against the shore. His hand is warm around hers. “If you stay here, I’m staying too,” he says, and she leans sideways, bumps his shoulder with her own, and kisses his temple.

“I won’t let you stay,” says Dutch.

“Then I won’t let you stay, either.”

+

“Curses don’t exist, and neither does magic,” says Zeph flatly, while Johnny slouches over in his chair, drinking something he hopes is hot and energizing. “But since we don’t understand the green plasma, sure, it might as well be curses and magic. We know now that Dutch is, somehow, made of or made from the green.”

“Basically,” agrees Johnny. “I don’t think we’re ever gonna get a consensus on that, but sure.”

“Right. So she’s drawing you in? Or something is using her to draw you in. It doesn’t totally matter, because the point is: you are not Hullen, you’re not infected with green goop at all, there’s absolutely no reason you should have a connection to anything green. Your sole point of contact is Dutch. It’s not unreasonable to think that maybe she’s overcoming the limitations of the plasma and calling you on her own sheer power.” Zeph pauses. “Goddamn, she is the coolest.”

“She is,” Johnny agrees, taking another long sip and hoping to wake up more. “So she calls and I come running. That’s pretty normal. What does it mean that it happens in this green space, though?”

“The green plasma is alive, we kinda know how that works,” says Zeph. “You cut it off from its other food sources. It has to nourish itself somehow.”

“You always know the right thing to say, Zeph,” says Johnny sourly.

+

“This place feels more real than anywhere else, lately,” Johnny confesses in the green space. “Even when I’m awake, back on the ship, it feels like something I’m watching, not real.”

Dutch feels the nightless stretch of time in the green weighing on her, and hearing that makes it even more oppressive. “You’re slipping, Johnny,” she says. “I think at first, it was just a message, like a projection. But I think more of you is coming over each time.”

“That’s bad,” says Johnny. “I mean, that’s bad, right? I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound like the green is getting healthier over time, no matter how much of me is coming here. I’m sleeping too much, over there. They’re worrying, but nobody’s staged an actual intervention yet.”

“I have to wake you up,” Dutch tells him. “Before it consumes you.”

“What happens to you?”

She doesn’t have an answer for that. She was the one who had wished for him here. Instead of responding, she hugs him, closing her eyes when he wraps his arms around her and pretending the respite from the tinted and scouring daylight is almost like the sleep she hasn’t had for a long time.

“I miss you,” Johnny says abruptly, which isn’t the topic at all. “Not just now, I mean… for awhile. I thought when I left it would be okay, since I was doing it to keep you out of the Nine’s line of fire, but god, I missed you. I missed us. I love my brother, but even him, I miss what we were before him. I miss you.”

“That’s not D’av’s problem,” Dutch says. “I mean it, and I meant it when I said you’re irreplaceable. He was just the first to arrive, and now, we could do a musical in the loading bay. I miss you, too, Johnny. But we don’t have to go and get something back. It’s still there, it’s just underneath everything.”

“Still?” he asks. All they’ve been through since the time he was worried D’avin was replacing him as her partner fill the canyon contained in that one word. 

“Still,” she says; “always.” She looks up, and kisses him on the cheek. “Tap my heart.”

+

Days spent off any planet are just arbitrary designations of sleep patterns, but that doesn’t change the fact that one morning, Johnny doesn’t wake up.

He knows when he doesn’t wake up, because he finds himself walking freely around in the green space, without Dutch anywhere in sight. She had wished for him, and he’d always been drawn to wherever she was, but something had changed.

D’avin knows, because he brought the ship down to spend a few careful hours where everyone on board could pick up whatever they needed before they took off again, and Johnny didn’t join them in the rush to get off the ship, and he isn’t roused by any amount of shaking.

Dutch walks up to Johnny on the beach, reaching out a hand for his. As she touches him, he turns to smoke. She spins, looking around for a reason, for attackers, for him. There’s nothing but the cliffs and the water. “Johnny!” she yells, dread pushing up in her chest. She can remember only too well that when she and Aneela first woke up together on this beach, Aneela had cautioned that the young Khlyen they had seen might not be himself. But she had known him for who he was. She would know Johnny.

As she watches, the beach populates with one Johnny after another, every copy of every time they had been here, more of him than she had realized he had made visits. Every one of them is not him. The certainty of that strikes her, and it is both crushing and hopeful; she is alone in a hall of mirrors displaying the only person she truly cares about, but she knows they are reflections. She can narrow this down.

She takes a deep breath, picks a spot on the horizon, and starts running.

+ 

Journeying through the green is getting harder and harder, Dutch finds. The brambles and weeds tangle at her legs, the tides rise too fast. Sinkholes open up as she walks. After all she and Aneela did to beat the Lady, there might not be enough of a green space left to sustain her. But like Aneela’s years trapped in solitude, Dutch doesn’t know how to get out.

This is some old fairy tale, Dutch realizes, with the briars and the impediments and the defeated Lady behind it all. It’s the curse where everyone falls asleep, and only when the knight has fought through the thorns does a kiss break the spell on everyone and free them.

She may be remembering it wrong. She has trouble imagining herself as some valorous knight.

Each time Dutch sees Johnny, it is harder to reach him, as if he is being guarded against her interference. Sometimes she runs, her eyes on the path before her to keep from stumbling on the uneven ground, and every time she looks up, he’s further away.

+

It’s almost as if failing the test of spirit or whatever it was with the Ferrun has come around to give her the test again. The green is a real place, but it is real like trust or love are real, not like solid land. Not like bullets. Every time she finds Johnny, they stumble down hills with the barest semblance of a path on them; she eventually looks around to see where they are, and that is when she loses him again. The landscape seems so real, but like all important things, it isn’t real at all, not like something you can take a handful of. 

Dutch runs into yet another wall-like hedge of briars, their black thorns as long as her hand. Johnny is behind it, or else it wouldn’t exist. She takes a deep breath, and rubs her eyes. “I am walking the path I’ve been walking,” she says to no one, “so blow me,” she adds, and steps forward into the briars, letting the thorns scratch her. But as she walks, deeper into the hedge, she notices the scratches are just the awareness she has just been scratched, and not the sensation itself; her jacket is not torn, and she isn’t bleeding. “Right,” she mutters, and keeps walking forward as the briars writhe around her, becoming a deep fog, and then the total darkness of a spacewalk in the shadow of an eclipse. There is no path. She keeps walking as though there is, one foot moving ahead, and then the other. Her steps crunch on rocks, then are muffled by manicured lawn, then sink in soft dirt.

And then there is Johnny, so she grabs him, and pulls him to her. She can feel his pulse in his wrist, beating steadily, and she looks into his eyes. The way he smiles at her, the way it reaches his eyes and they crinkle at the edges— that is real. He is not an illusion created by this place. She puts a hand up to his cheek, and feels the rough stubble.

“Stay with me,” Dutch whispers, finding herself hoarse and thirsty. Physical needs had not bothered her here before, but she was pushing the boundaries of the green space and it was pushing back.

Fine.

She ignores how she feels, the nagging wrongness of the bleached hair always falling in her face, and the shifting landscape around them, and focuses on one thing, the most real of all of it. For six years, it had just been the two of them, and the warrant. They’d made a home of each other that they’d never had before; he was every good thing she’d never lived with, and she shed the roles she’d been taught of assassin and seducer and gave herself over to the simple joy of fighting. Her certainties narrow to knowing that they will always be together, and that the path ahead is whatever they put their next step, and, holding on to those two things, she leans forward and presses her lips to his.

When Dutch breaks the kiss, she looks beyond him to the world around them. It is still green and overbright. “No,” she says, “no, that was supposed to end it.”

“Um,” says Johnny, “if you just did that to get us out of here, no other reason, we can totally agree that was weird.”

She is still certain of two things, and holds to them like a rope thrown out to a drowning person. “But if there was another reason?” she asks. “Apart from the possibility of breaking a curse on us?”

“Then,” John says slowly, “provided it’s not one of the times you refuse to deal with your feelings by having sex with the nearest person you can afford to kick out, maybe it wasn’t _completely_ weird.”

“I do not—okay, that is a ridiculous oversimplification—“ Dutch starts to protest, and he laughs.

“Do you want me to list the ways I’ve seen you do that,” Johnny asks, “or would you rather wait to get out of here, so Pree and I can do it in more detail?”

“Oh _my god_ ,” she groans. “You are the worst, Johnny Jaqobis, and I do not know why I love you.”

He makes a considering face, then shrugs. “Bad taste?” he suggests.

If she hadn’t been convinced before that he was the real Johnny, she would be now. Not because he knows her far too well, although that is part of it, but by the way he gives her every chance to seize any regrets and pretend she hadn’t meant to kiss him, not for real. Not if there was anything in it that could put a hole in the way they mattered to each other. “Definitely bad taste,” she agrees. “And I don’t think it was completely weird, either.”

“Okay,” he says, grins, and then pulls her into a tight hug. “Alright. So, what’s the next plan to get out of here?”

+

He suggests treating the network the green comprises as if it were a malfunctioning program, and force-quitting it, she laughs, because  _no_.

“It’s not a machine, it’s alive, it holds memories and… learns, doesn’t it?” she asks. She isn’t someone who can fully understand this, that’s why she has John and then Zeph, but she’s invested in knowing enough.

“The same argument could be made about Lucy,” Johnny says. “From people who make arguments about artificial neural networks, anyway. None of this is shit anyone knows, Dutch, but I don’t think we’re getting out of here without pulling the plug on this box it has us caught in.”

“Which means we… find an off button, or something!”

“Not from the inside,” he says patiently. “If that existed, we would have found it by now, and even if we had, we couldn’t be sure not stopping the entire thing would work.” As he talks, he reaches down and pulls out the gun from the holster strapped to his leg. “And since you’re the one with enough connection to the green to tell it what to do, you should be able to end this space by getting me out of it.”

“Well, I thought you said I don’t get to shoot you twice,” Dutch replies, keeping her tone as light as his. He absolutely cannot be serious, and so she won’t be, either. 

“Okay, true. But that’s with real bullets, in real places, not this… green space.” He shrugs vaguely. “Look, I’ve had plenty of dreams about you shooting me, dreams are the exception to that rule. So it works!” But he isn’t able to keep up the joke, if he ever got to that point in the first place. His explanation sounded as tenuous as any of his other hypotheses, the ones she knows to call hypotheses because they’re too loose for him to let her call theories without him getting antsy. She knows it means he hasn’t tested it enough, or at all, and won’t let anyone in the ship talk like something he came up with is a fact. This idea definitely is not a fact.

She still won’t take the gun from his hands. “I can’t lose you, Johnny,” Dutch says. “I’ve lost people, so many people, and I could survive that. I know I can survive losing people. But not you, Johnny.”

He smiles at her, a little crookedly, because he doesn’t know if this is going to work, either. “I know, Dutch. Look, I don’t want to die, okay? I’d never leave you like that. But you have to wake me up to end this for both of us, and I can’t be alive here and there.”

“Says the one who won’t be dealing with the nightmares about it afterwards,” Dutch replies. 

Johnny steps closer, and reaches for her. He takes her hand, placing it on the gun he holds. “And when you have nightmares, I’ll be there to wake you up and dodge whatever reflexes you accidentally try to kill me with and then tell you it was just a dream,” he tells her. “I don’t know what happens when this place decomposes, but it’ll take both of us with it. I can’t pull us out. If there was a way I could figure out other than this god-I-hope-it’s-symbolic killing my ass, then shit, we’d already be gone, but we’re at the end of ideas, here. Either you end it now, or wait for this fall apart and take us with it.” He pauses for a moment. “I don’t want that one, I want you back on the ship with me and Lucy and D’av and I want late-night drinking and I want to read comic books in bed, and I want to kiss you when it’s real.”

She leans over and kisses him, and it’s so simple, when the world is just them, connected. Then she takes the gun from his hands. “I swear, Johnny Jaqobis, you better be right about this, or I’m going to find a way to resuscitate you, just so I can kill you again." 

He puts his hands up in mock surrender. “I promise, I’m working with the best information I have, you’re welcome to do whatever you like to the beautiful corpse I leave behind if I’m wrong.” He flashes a grin at her, and she lets out a laugh, that breaks too quickly into an almost-sob. 

Dutch checks the chamber without ejecting a round, then slowly thumbs off the safety. The way Johnny has always looked at her is too much for her, eyes wide and trusting even despite all he’s seen of her. It’s foolish of him to look at her that way, and dear trees, does she love him for it. “Close your eyes,” she whispers. 

He obeys without the slightest hesitation. She doesn’t understand how the green works, and she was somehow born out of it, and she doesn’t understand why he thinks that he can be here, in this space, as just a trapped projection with her. She doesn’t understand the biology nerd stuff that Zeph does. She probably comprehends more about the chemistry of the Hullen and the physics of moving signals or ships across space than most people, just through sheer osmosis, but this is so far beyond her. 

But Johnny trusts her, and looks to her to give the orders. That’s what has held them together all these years, before and after everyone else started making themselves at home in her life. He follows her lead and she follows his advice. Not always, and not always without an argument, but enough, and when it matters. Enough to do what he says has to be done, when he hands her a gun and tells her to shoot him. So she takes a couple steps back, because this might only get rid of his projection form but could probably deafen his real ears, and lines up the shot. There’s no way to miss, not at this distance. Maybe she can spare herself this one memory. 

She steadies her arm, closes her eyes, and squeezes the trigger.

+ 

_And then she woke up._

And then she wakes up, goddammit, because she’s read too much of Johnny’s trope-tastic trash fiction, and she was made from the green, pulled from it as a fully-formed child, and there are a few set ways to return home from travels in a magically found strange land. She is on her own bed, in her own ship. She blinks at the ceiling. 

“Lucy,” she called out, “did I just… go anywhere. Physically. I haven’t just been napping here for…. a while, have I?” 

“You have been asleep on your bed for one hour an forty-six minutes, undergoing one full REM cycle,” Lucy said. Dutch groaned. “And before that,” Lucy continued, “none of us knew where you were, except Johnny was possibly losing his mind and almost going comatose trying to find you. Then you just appeared here, asleep.”

Her bedroom door slides open, and Johnny bursts in, “You’re awake,” he says. “Good!”

“You’re alive,” she responds. “You jackass!” She throws a pillow at him. “If you knew it worked, why couldn’t you have shut down the green?”

“I didn’t know it worked,” he protests, belatedly shielding his face. Dutch only has a limited number of pillows. “And you were the one who could control the green. I was just there. You had to end it. You had to wake me up.” He sits on her bed, shoving her legs aside to make room. "Hey. We're home."

Since all her pillows are on the floor, she pulls him over into lying down next to her so she can rest her head on his shoulder. He obliges, and shifts to wrap an arm around her. She's missed the hum of the ship, the indiscernible sound of other people arguing somewhere, the steady white glow of artificial light. "Yeah," she agrees. "We're home."


End file.
